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Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

ian-leslie.com

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Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#111

Post by ggm »

WalterBright wrote: post #96
ggm wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wright brothers story is well worth reading up on. The director of the Smithsonian refused to believe them, and championed an alternate "first powered flight" for a long time. This is why at least one Wright flyer wound up in the Science Museum in London. It only got fixed after he died/retired. The lack of history on display in the Air & Space Museum on this, is quite interesting: it's like the whole "tell the t…

I've seen many current attempts on HackerNews to elevate one or another claimant to the first flight throne. It's not just the Smithsonian a century ago!

Yep: we've got one down here:

https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/history-cultu...

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#112

Post by dataflow »

rectang wrote: post #19

I would find this piece more convincing if it had sampled stories from different sources in service of its thesis rather than focusing on a single work the author finds particularly galling, as there is no shortage of fictional narratives anywhere — look no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks. Given the narrowness of the material cited, this piece seems to me like unequal application of skept…

> look no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks.

One could make just as good of a case about online users posting disparaging and speculative comments without presenting a shred of evidence, looking no farther than HN comments. Where does this kind of reasoning take us...?

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#113

Post by mcpackieh »

thagsimmons wrote: post #102
ggm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an exceptionally hot take. Manning was Charles Manning Hope Clark. You can verify this easily. His status in Australian history is mixed, because of the strong left/right axis of history as a field in Australia. Manning Clark was unquestionably of the left. The Australian, and its tame philosopher-historian Gerard Henderson makes much of this, and Manning Clark being awarded an order of Lenin for history by t…

Reading Windschuttle's "Fabrication of Aboriginal History" along with the heavily critical responses in "Whitewash" was a fascinating intellectual exercise. I went in quite neutral on the issue and came out convinced that, while there are some factual issues in Winschuttle's account, the thrust of his argument was correct and that Australian history was in deep trouble as a discipline. The essays in Whitewash show al…

> https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/1876492058/

>$900, oof. Archive.org has a scan: https://archive.org/details/fabrication-of-aboriginal-histor...

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#114

Post by Someone »

simbolit wrote: post #3

I think the authors confuses stories and /grand stories/ (sometimes called "meta-narratives"). I don't see how it is possible to do history without stories. That literally is what history is, telling stories about the past. Yes, the stories should have a factual basis, and some don't, but that's not a problem with stories as such. The problem lies with the desire for all stories to fit a /grand story/. Such a grand s…

> I don't see how it is possible to do history without stories.

History is story-telling. https://www.etymonline.com/word/story:

"connected account or narration, oral or written," c. 1200, originally "narrative of important events or celebrated persons of the past, true or presumed to be; history," from Anglo-French storie, estorie, Old French estoire "story, chronicle, history," and directly from Late Latin storia, shortened from Latin historia "history, account, tale, story.

The non-historical sense of "account of some happening or events alleged to have happened" is by late 14c., but the word was not differentiated from history until 1500s and was used at first also in most of the senses of history. In Middle English a storier was a historian (early 14c. as a surname), storial (adj.) was "historically true, dealing with history," and a book of story was a history book."

IMO, the title is bad. The complaint in the article isn’t about story-telling, isn’t even about making them (overly) dramatic, isn’t even on not mentioning facts (nobody disputes there were slaves working in those ironworks, or that a man named Cort was nearby at some time), but on adding ‘facts’ and building a story that doesn’t follow from the facts at all.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#115

Post by beebeepka »

paganel wrote: post #104
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I provide language revision for academics who are non-native speakers of English, so I read a hell of a lot of papers, theses, and grant applications, while also continuing to publish and peer-review in my own field. My impression is that peer review in the social sciences and history isn’t necessarily the major force for conformance to whatever contemporary social narratives. Papers often deal with minutiae, and bot…

> claiming the research would benefit some minority or another, are inserted at a late stage after someone mentions that the application would stand no chance without them. Funny, it's similar to "forced" mentions of Marxism inserted apparently at will in social science books/papers written in Romanian back when the Wall was still up. Towards the later years of the communist government being in power those Marx inser…

Was Marx anything like Ceausescu?

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#117

Post by rectang »

dataflow wrote: post #112
rectang wrote: post #19

I would find this piece more convincing if it had sampled stories from different sources in service of its thesis rather than focusing on a single work the author finds particularly galling, as there is no shortage of fictional narratives anywhere — look no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks. Given the narrowness of the material cited, this piece seems to me like unequal application of skept…

> look no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks. One could make just as good of a case about online users posting disparaging and speculative comments without presenting a shred of evidence, looking no farther than HN comments. Where does this kind of reasoning take us...?

I cited textbooks because I figured their issues were well known, because numerous examples can be found across many political and social axes and thus we might avoid tumbling into a partisan hellhole, and because I knew I could back it up if I had to, as I already have in a sibling comment.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#118

Post by ggm »

thagsimmons wrote: post #102
ggm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an exceptionally hot take. Manning was Charles Manning Hope Clark. You can verify this easily. His status in Australian history is mixed, because of the strong left/right axis of history as a field in Australia. Manning Clark was unquestionably of the left. The Australian, and its tame philosopher-historian Gerard Henderson makes much of this, and Manning Clark being awarded an order of Lenin for history by t…

Reading Windschuttle's "Fabrication of Aboriginal History" along with the heavily critical responses in "Whitewash" was a fascinating intellectual exercise. I went in quite neutral on the issue and came out convinced that, while there are some factual issues in Winschuttle's account, the thrust of his argument was correct and that Australian history was in deep trouble as a discipline. The essays in Whitewash show al…

If you want another example of this, Try "Haig's Command: A Reassessment" by Denis Winter.

Winter had access to documents held in the Australian war memorial archives which strongly disagree with official war history, because they're the input texts before the official edit. He drives very hard to this being a whitewash by the establishment of Haig's command. The counter view is that it's entirely normal editing, He's displaying the not uncommon Australian/Canadian/New-Zealand dislike of Haig because Haig used the colonial forces as shock troops and then played down their role in the turn-around to attrition warfare, and he's probably also strongly leftist and anti-establishment. It's a great read, but unquestionably one-eyed.

I don't agree with you about Windschuttle but I am also very biassed against him by his continued association with the News Ltd schools of journalism which is a strongly rightist world view. I could believe he's a good historian. He's not in any sense the neutral arbiter. I think he would be amongst the first to deny it.

His primary vocal opponent in the press here in Oz (Robert Manne) is equally one-eyed and at times, more passionate than accurate.

I'm not sure the practice of history in Oz is any better or worse than anywhere else to be honest. I miss Eric Hobsbawm, who never hid his marxist affiliations. Hobsbawm absolutely hated counter-factuals. I rather like them but they're fiction, not history.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#119

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

troupe wrote: post #37

Increasingly? Herodotus comes to mind.

> And so, Herodotus – the myth-maker – talks up the Spartiates at Thermopylae (you know, the brave 300) and quietly leaves out the other Laconians (who, if you scrutinize his numbers, he knows must be there, to the tune of c. 900 men), downplaying the other Greeks. Spartan leadership is lionized, even when it makes stupid mistakes. Thermopylae, to be clear, was a military disaster and Spartan intransigence nearly loses the battle of Plataea, but Herodotus represents this as boldness in the face of the enemy

https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#120

Post by watwut »

supazek wrote: post #16
whatshisface wrote: post #7

I guess it's impressively bad that a blatant conspiracy theory made it past peer review and into Wikipedia, but this article is a summary of a review of a rebuttal to a bad paper.

>made it past peer review I don’t think that’s an especially difficult thing to do. It seems any paper dealing with social sciences or history that fits the current narrative is lauded and “reviewed” favorably. I think the mechanism which facilitates this is relatively simple and similar to how USSR officials would rather bring good news than bad facts

Except you made that accusation up. In all likelihood, you do not know how censorship in USSR functioned (because the hints you provide suggest so). And in all likelihood, you know zero about what is in historical articles or how peer review functions.
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